Experimental demonstration of squeezed-state quantum averaging

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a universal quantum averaging process implementing the harmonic mean of quadrature variances. The averaged variances are prepared probabilistically by means of linear optical interference and measurement-induced conditioning. We verify that the implemented harmonic mean yields a lower value than the corresponding value obtained for the standard arithmetic-mean strategy. The effect of quantum averaging is experimentally tested for squeezed and thermal states as well as for uncorrelated and partially correlated noise sources. The harmonic-mean protocol can be used to efficiently stabilize a set of squeezed-light sources with statistically fluctuating noise levels.